Use a Surround Sound Approach to Your Strategy

In a world of multi-channel marketing, it’s important to be everywhere.

As marketers, we strive to get in front of the right audience with the right frequency. But if you’re serving ads only in display, your audience will quickly feel spammed.

The best campaigns feel much more like a conversation than marketing. It’s rewarding when a video creeps into your feed that you find inspiring, educational or entertaining. It feels good to hear that one of your favorite brands is supporting a podcast you listen to. When you’re looking for just the right gift, and you see it appear in an ad filled with holiday suggestions. When marketing is great, it feels right on time, relevant, and welcome. So how does your brand achieve this?

Approach your marketing like storytelling for all five senses. You can show a snapshot of a happy customer using your new product in a display ad. But in an audio commercial, that featured customer can tell the story for you as a testimonial. In email, you can introduce a video series on YouTube, each episode better informing your customer about this potential purpose. On social media, offer a link to a blog, where you provide a download offering all the crucial data on this new product. Each of these elements tells a part of the story, and together, they have the ability to influence your audience. If you’re pushing something new only in one spot, you only have that tiny part of the story told.

Videos can be placed on YouTube, for organic searchers to find. More succinct cuts can become video ads in display, streamed commercial content, or bumper ads. Written blog content can become sponsor content, whitepapers, and even gated content on Linkedin or other social media. One channel = spam. Multiple channels = surprise and delight.

If you’re like me, you had a disappointing boom box in your freshman dorm. It let you sing along, but it didn’t offer an experience. When I got that first apartment, I graduated to actual speakers, and eventually to surround sound. Using this same concept, where each channel represents a speaker, build your campaign from single channel to surround sound. Begin by considering where you can place the assets you already have. Grow to building new creative that might be for a specific channel.